


Surprise Friends

by Returnofmorningstar



Category: Borderlands (Video Games), Tales from the Borderlands - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Catboy Rhys, Fluff, M/M, Rhys is an experiment
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 19:53:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9008758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Returnofmorningstar/pseuds/Returnofmorningstar
Summary: When Jack gets a message asking him to visit the Wildlife Exploitation Preserve, he sends Timothy in his stead so he can continue working. Timothy soon learns he got the better end of the deal.My contribution to the Borderlands Gift Exchange.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Sooo I was really unhappy with this, but I saw a lot of really nice comments when it was posted on tumblr, so I decided to post it here as well. While I do have an idea for a continuation of this, I'm going to mark it as complete until I know for a fact that I'll write the second part.

“Jack, I don’t think this is a job you should be putting off on me. They asked for you specifically—”

“Kiddo, they  _ always  _ ask for me specifically. This isn’t new. Just go down there and see what they want.” Jack had his legs kicked up on his massive desk and his arms folded behind his head. He really fit the super-villain image that Jakobs plastered all over Pandora just a few days before Jack moonshot their headquarters. Not that Timothy would ever acknowledge that he saw the resemblance between those posters and his boss. He liked his paycheck, and keeping his brains inside of his skull. “ECHO me if it’s anything good, okay, other Jack?” he asked pointedly, the eyebrows on his mask raised.

Timothy stifled a scowl and nodded. “Yes, sir. I’ll let you know.” Jack beamed at him, made a degrading remark about him being a good boy, and sent the double on his way. Timothy had a lot of packing to do, after all. The scientists at the Wildlife Exploitation Preserve claimed it was an urgent matter that demanded his attention at once, despite it not being an emergency. They compromised with waiting two days for the CEO (or his double, apparently) to pack and to be sent down to Pandora. At least Jack was nice enough to get him that much time; this way he could at least pack a suitcase since he had no idea how long he was going to be down there. Hopefully it wouldn’t be more than a day or so.

* * *

Being shot from the Eye of Helios in a metal box was possibly one of the worst experiences Timothy had ever lived through—that included dozens of invasive surgeries  _ and _ fighting a vault monster. He’d done it once when Helios was under attack and now Jack was personally shoving him into a car loaded into the Eye, though this time he was cackling with amusement instead of trying to hold off the Lost Legion. Tim fought his way across Elpis with the hopes that it meant he never had to be shot out of a space cannon ever again. But nothing about his life was ever that simple.

The car landed just outside the preserve and Timothy had barely three minutes to calm his nerves before they arrived. He climbed out of the car on shaky legs and did his best to seem composed like the real Jack would be as he did so. He was failing, but at least nobody was around to see. His loaderbot companion waited semi-patiently for him to regain control over his stomach before calling for someone to escort them. A young woman with short blonde hair came sprinting out of the preserve a few minutes later, her skin flushed with embarrassment. She looked a little bit like Janey, when he thought about it, and she apologized for not having someone outside to wait on them. She introduced herself as Diane and nothing else—no title or anything.  

Tim waved his hand dismissively. “Whatever, cupcake.” He had gotten “better” at talking to girls over the past year or so. Though he still always wanted to apologize. “I’m a busy man. Let’s get the show on the road.” She nodded quickly and led him and his robot bodyguard through the doors to the preserve.

The first thing that he noticed was that it was nothing like Helios. Which was understandable, considering they were on a planet and not in space. Still, it was odd to see that many of the hallways were just open walkways that crossed above pens. He tried not to look at the mutated skags that screeched down below, hoping that their mutations wouldn’t affect their ability to jump. Instead, he focused on mimicking his boss’s demeanor and appearance. He was still a little new to doing Jack’s work for him but so far he had run into no trouble and he planned to keep it that way. Even if the assassination attempts got a little annoying sometimes.

He was led inside of an actual building, which was a relief despite all of the enclosures that they passed, and he couldn’t help but notice many of the hallways were empty. There were no employees wandering around or even any janitorial robots. Were all of their Pandoran facilities this empty? It was...strange. Each department of Helios easily had over three dozen employees; he hadn’t been in such an empty building since he was on Elpis and he was now accustomed to the crowded walkways of Helios, even if the crowds always parted for him.

Even the office that they finally stopped at only had three people in it: two men and another woman. They all looked rather exhausted, halfway slumped over their desks as they talked, until Diane cleared her throat. They all scrambled to their feet once they noticed Tim, stumbling over greetings and expressing their gratitude for his appearance. Which, though not unusual, seemed particularly more...grateful than it usually did.

“Soooo, what’s the deal?” he asked hesitantly, his persona faltering slightly as alarm bells started ringing in his head. He didn’t like people that were  _ too  _ excited to meet Jack. It made him nervous, even though Diane had seemed nice enough. “Why did you have to have the one and only Handsome Jack down here?” he asked after putting on his fake persona once again.

Diane grinned and laughed a little. “You’re not Jack.” Timothy froze momentarily, then opened his mouth to deny it before she continued, “Handsome Jack never comes to the preserve personally. Not since the week it was founded. He just looks at the reports and checks on the experiments through video feeds.”

“Then why ask for him?” Tim questioned, ready to bolt out the door if things went south. “If you knew he wouldn’t come, why bother?”

The second woman, shorter than the first, suddenly beamed. “Because now  _ you’re  _ here and that works just as well.”

Timothy took two steps back towards his loaderbot and rested his hand on the grip of his pistol. “Why me? Why am I important?”

She frowned at his anxious posture and shook her head. “No, no. We’re not going to try and hurt you. We just want you to look at something. You can even bring your robot with you,” she offered, despite the disapproving stare from one of the men. “I’ll brief you on the way to the enclosure, if you want to go. Anna, come with us.”  

The offer to let the loader stay at his side comforted Tim a little and his posture relaxed slightly. He eventually sighed out “Fine, let’s go,” and followed the two women from the office. Nobody said anything at first and the momentary silence was awkward; he attempted to break the ice. “How did you know about his body doubles?”

“Oh, it’s been a rumor for a while now. We weren’t sure if it was true, but we thought it couldn’t hurt to try. When he agreed to come down, we knew the rumors were true,” Anna explained with a wide, triumphant smile. Tim had to admit it was a pretty clever tactic. Jack wasn’t necessarily covert with his opinions “And well, honestly, we don’t need Handsome Jack specifically. Just someone who looks like him.”

"And why is that?” Tim ventured hesitantly. If they didn’t want to tell him, he supposed he would find out eventually, but it would be nice if—"

Finally, Diane looked over at them and beamed at Tim. “We want you to meet one of the experiments.”    
  
Tim stopped dead in his tracks. Both women slowed and turned back to look at him, both having the gall to look confused. “I’ve had enough encounter with awful creatures to last me the rest of my life, thanks. I would rather not go into any of these enclosures and possibly get mauled.“ They knew he wasn’t the real Jack, so he wasn’t fearing assassination, only the chance of getting maimed because of the mistakes of well-intentioned scientists.

Anna’s eyes widened at the idea and she shook her head. “No, no! You’re not going to be seeing any of the vicious experiments,” she assured him. “He’s a sweetheart. He looks a little scary, but he’s totally incapable of hurting anything.” She gave Diane a hesitant look, then elaborated when she was given a nod. “You see, we asked you here for two reasons: one, we want to see if he can recognize you—or, more accurately, Handsome Jack—outside of pictures, and two, well…” She quirked a small smile. “He’s a little obsessed with Handsome Jack, and he turned two yesterday. We were hoping you would have arrived in time for that, but obviously that didn’t work out. Which is fine, really, because you’re here now. Oh, he’s going to be so happy to see you. He never gets visitors and I always think he’s so lonely since his friends got transferred after that last security malfunction and—”

Diane leaned in close to his other ear as Anna rambled on and on about the experiment, visibly excited by the thought of him. “She’s like his mother,” she whispered to Tim. “Damien originally had the idea to do some genetic testing of our own, but she’s been involved from the start and took over once he dropped out. She turned down a promotion to one of the safer facilities in order to stay with him.”

Despite his nerves, Tim couldn’t help but smile faintly. That was...actually kind of endearing. She obviously cared very much for the experiment and he was glad that at least one of the creatures in the preserve was treated with some kindness. He had seen the slagged skags and rakks on the way to the office, and they all looked miserable.

Anna was still talking and Tim cleared his throat to signal her that he needed her attention. “So, what’s his name?”

“Rhys,” she answered enthusiastically. She glanced ahead of them and gestured to one of the larger inner enclosures. “Oh, that’s his! We had to move him last year because he got too big for his old enclosure. He’s much happier here than in his old one anyway; I think it’s because the ceiling has the actual sky projected onto it instead of those awful lights.”

Tim was so lost in her rambling that it took him several seconds to process what she had said. “Wait, just how big is he?”

“He’s not so big. He just needed a lot of room once he was full grown,” she chirped as she moved away from them to open the door to the enclosure. Tim swallowed around the knot in his throat as he stepped into the false environment once the glass parted for him. He kept his hand resting on his gun, though he didn’t draw it in case that signalled him as a threat. It helped his nerves that his Loaderbot stood just inside the habitat, waiting for commands.

Anna had been right about the ceiling; it perfectly reflected the cloudy orange sky outside as dusk slowly approached. The walls were painted to give the synthetic forest the appearance of being more expansive. The bark on the trees felt real as it brushed his hand and he hesitantly stepped underneath a branch.

He jumped when a sharp whistle sounded behind him, and he whirled around to see Anna standing in the doorway. She waved at him, then raised her hands to her mouth. “Rhysie, come down here, please!” she called.

For a moment there was nothing, and then a rustle above Tim’s head. He braced himself as the rustling got closer, but all he felt was the air rush above his head. He watched a creature land in front of him and roll to lessen the impact on its knees. It rose to its full height (which was just a tad higher than him) and turned to face Tim. It—no, he—was surprisingly humanoid and...was that a tail behind him?

Tim forgot all about getting into character when the slim man’s face visibly brightened. He had a metal arm with claws, his slitted eyes were two different colors, and he was wearing an outfit that looked to be an amalgamation of spare fabric cobbled into what was supposed to be business casual, but the first word that came to Tim’s head when he saw him was  _ adorable.  _ The tan ears swiveled and Tim marveled at the spots that dotted his fur.

Before he could say anything, Rhys was excitedly bouncing on his heels. “Handsome Jack?! Handsome Jack is here?!” He turned his head to look back at Anna and yes, that was a tail that swished behind him. Anna must have signaled him to pay attention, because the man focused on Tim again a moment later. “I am really—no, wait, I really—” He frowned at his own ability to string together the sentence he wanted to convey. “You’re the best,” he finally said.

Tim straightened up and grinned like he had practiced over the past couple of years. “I am pretty fantastic, aren’t I?” The hardest part about Tim’s job was the moments like these; he couldn’t be a dick to someone who so obviously admired Handsome Jack (though only God knew why Rhys liked him so much) despite Jack’s entire personality being in the shape of a dick. He always had to choose between the risk of being discovered or of hurting someone’s feelings and potentially destroying their image of their idol. If he could gauge a person’s behavior first, that usually smoothed out the process (since it was much easier to be an asshole to another asshole), but people were rarely that cut and dry. For Rhys though, Tim’s priority was making the experiment happy.

Before he could say anything else, Rhys took one step forward, big enough to close pretty much any distance between them. Tim watched the slits dilate from up close, but he noticed that the blue eye actually glowed, even in the dim light. He stiffened when Rhys leaned in and his face rubbed against the edge of his jaw. “Uh, what’re you doing there, kiddo?” he asked hesitantly.

Rhys stepped back a moment later, putting just a hint of space between them. “You don’t smell like I thought you would. And you’re letting me get this close.” He reached up to touch the edge of his mask with his flesh fingers and Tim tried not to shiver at the sensation of rough callouses against his skin. His mask, while not bolted to his face, hid the faint dots of freckles that developed whenever his face saw the sun, despite the surgeries to get rid of them. “You’re not Jack, are you?”

Tim tensed up and frowned at Rhys. How come everyone around here could guess that?! He’d  _ never  _ had anyone guess the truth while he was on Helios! Granted, Diane and the others had a pretty surefire way to figure out his authenticity, but that didn’t explain how Rhys could figure it out. “How’d you know?”

Rhys smiled and pointed at his own head. “The eye they gave me scanned your face. It could tell you didn’t always look like this.” He looked so damn  _ proud _ of himself that Timothy’s frustration melted away rather quickly. “Why do you look like him?”

Timothy gave him a tiny smile. “Student loans are a bitch,” he joked awkwardly. Not that Rhys would have idea what that meant. “He hired me to pretend to be him for different reasons. Sometimes he makes me do the things he doesn’t want to,” he explained. “He was supposed to be the one who came down here, but as you can see, he decided to send me instead.” He felt awkward now, since he knew that Rhys was a fanboy of Jack’s. “So, sorry you couldn’t meet your idol.”

Rhys shrugged, then smiled. “It’s okay. You seem nicer than he does. Everyone talks about how much of an ass he is.”

Tim chuckled. “Yeah, that’s an accurate description of him. I’m not really him, but I’m here. What would you like to do? I’m here for your birthday, after all.” Even if he was late.

The experiment turned back to the scientist who still waited at the door, and when she nodded in confirmation of something, he eagerly focused on Tim again. “I wanna show you something.” He held out his flesh hand to Tim who, mindful of the claws, accepted it and allowed himself to be led through the trees. It was getting rather dark since the habitat, but Rhys led him with confidence. He didn’t allow Tim to run into any obstacles, even when he stopped abruptly and motioned upwards. “We need to go up there,” he explained. He took Timothy’s hands and placed them against the trunk of the thick tree, allowing him to grip the carved rungs of a ladder. “Here, use this to get up. I’ll meet you up there.” Rhys gripped another tree and climbed up it before Tim could ask any questions.

It was either stay there in the dark or follow Rhys, so Tim hesitantly climbed up the ladder. He kept his eyes firmly trained on the rungs, refusing to look anywhere else. He was doing everything in his power to not look down at the ground or to even think about the fact that he was getting further and further away from the safety of the ground. At least on Elpis he wouldn’t fall faster enough to seriously injure himself. Here on Pandora though, one wrong move and he’d be dead. The thought made his stomach churn and he had to pause for several moments to refrain from throwing up.

“You okay?”

Tim jerked his head up, startled, and saw the bright cerulean glow of Rhys’s robotic eye above him. “I…uh, just don’t do so well with heights,” he confessed. He continued his climb slowly and only stopped again when he noticed Rhys was sitting on a platform just above him. The tree seemed to be a support beam as well as a way to get to it, and he climbed onto the platform carefully. He sucked in a breath when he realized he couldn’t see the ground and crawled away from the edge. He didn’t mind that Rhys was watching him patiently, albeit a little curiously.

Rhys waited for him to get settled in the middle of the wooden platform, then picked up the remote he had set beside him. He laid down on his back, Tim copying him, and with the press of a couple of buttons, the image of the sky above them faded away and Tim let out a small snort when an image of Helios in the night sky appeared above them. “I can change where the cameras outside point,” he explained. “I like this one the best because I can see Helios. I want to go up there one day, but I’m not even allowed out of the facility” He glanced at Tim. “What’s it like?”

Tim was silent for a moment, debating on whether to be truthful or not. “It’s…interesting. There’s a lot of people up there, so it’s pretty crowded. And it’s weird being on a space station instead of a planet because everything is artificial.” He looked around. “But I suppose you’re familiar with that.” He scratched the back of his neck. “There’s a lot of danger up there. Everyone’s looking for the next promotion and sometimes you don’t see someone for a while and you have to assume the worst.” He noticed the way Rhys seemed to deflate a little and he scrambled to recover. “But the view is amazing. Especially from Jack’s office. You can see both Elpis and Pandora from Helios. Jack usually has me stay in the apartment with him, and sometimes I get up during the night and go sit in the living room to watch the stars. Kind of like how we’re doing now.”

That seemed to cheer the experiment up a bit and Tim watched the way his ears twitched and swiveled at the slightest noise. “So, Rhys. What’s it’s like having ears and a tail?” He had tried hard not to immediately bring up the attributes but he couldn’t help but stare at them. He was infatuated with the idea of touching them, but he knew that was rude and so he refrained. He hadn’t had a cat since he was in college and even though Rhys wasn’t an actual cat, he had a tail and stroking a cat’s tail was Tim’s favorite pastime when he was stressed over finals.

“...I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve never been without them.” He shifted a little closer to Tim, who sucked in a breath as his eyes met Rhys’s. It was weird to see the glow of Rhys’s eye and not much else; even Wilhelm’s eye hadn’t been bright enough for it to be noticeable. “I don’t know how you experience the world. But I suppose we are not that different?” His tone pitched to indicate a question, as if he was unsure with his statement.

Tim smiled faintly. “Can I touch them? Your ears, I mean.” He wanted to see if they were as soft as they looked. Rhys shifted a little closer and Tim maneuvered his arm so he could reach out and run his fingers over the fur. THey were, in fact, as soft as they looked; it was the softest fur he’d ever touched, or maybe it only felt like that since it had been so long. Rhys started to purr surprisingly loudly, the sound echoing in the nearly silent habitat. Tim grinned. “You remind me of my old cat. His name was Henry and his purr was almost deafening.” He could remember using it to keep himself awake when studying as well as pushing him off the bed when he was allowed to get some sleep.

Rhys opened his eyes, the purring fading away gradually. “What happened to him?”

“I graduated college and couldn’t afford to keep him any longer. I had to give him to some friends. By the time I got the job as Jack’s body double, he had died of old age.” Timothy shrugged in an attempt to seem less bothered about it than he was. “Then I just never got another one.” He always told himself that he was too busy, but he knew that he was afraid of dying and leaving it all alone. How was he supposed to take care of an animal when his whole job description boiled down to ‘protect the real Handsome Jack from assassination’? Still, he couldn’t deny that he missed having a cat.

Suddenly Rhys was sitting up and maybe he had already been sitting up and Tim didn’t notice, but the experiment was looking at him with an expression of…sympathy? That was something Tim hadn’t known in a long time. But he lost all train of thought when Rhys rubbed his head against Timothy’s shoulder and rested one hand over his. He looked up at the older man with sadness in his eyes and Timothy tried to relax the tension with an awkward chuckle. “What’s with the headbutt, kitten?” (Oh God was Jack’s shitty humor rubbing off on him? He hoped not.)

Rhys either ignored and didn’t understand the accidental pun. His face did, however, flush pink at the question. “You just sounded lonely… And I know what loneliness is like.” He was quiet for a moment, still covering Timothy’s hand. “What was your name? Before you became Jack.”

“...It was Timothy. Timothy Lawrence.” He hadn’t said his own name in almost a decade due to his contract, but Rhys would never be able to report him for it.

The younger man smiled and Timothy felt his chest clench. “Timothy. I like that name.” He looked up at the image of Helios looming above them. “When do you have to go back?” There was sadness in his voice and Tim wanted to hug him.

“Oh, not for a week or so,” he lied. He smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ll stick around for a while. And maybe one day I can take you up to Helios with me.”

Rhys perked up immediately. “Really?! That would be so cool!” He leaned over and wrapped his arms around Timothy. “I’m glad you can stay. It’d be nice to have a friend for once.”

Timothy felt his heart melt at the fondness already developing for Rhys. Hopefully Jack wouldn’t mind if he extended his stay…

And if he sneaked an experiment out of the preserve and up to Helios, nobody really needed to know.


End file.
